Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  A Thin Light Far Away

  In the winter of 1919, when Ida Mae was trailing her father out to the field, George and Pershing were learning to crawl, and the first wave of migrants was stirring to life, an astronomer made a startling discovery. The astronomer, named Edwin Hubble, working out of the University of Chicago, looked through one of the most powerful telescopes of his time.

  What he saw would eventually become the most significant astronomical find of the century and would come to parallel the awakening of an isolated people in his own country. It would confirm what for generations had been whispered of but dismissed as impossible. It occurred near the start of a long pilgrimage of Americans seeking to escape their own harsh, known world.

  Hubble identified a star that was far, far away and was not the same sun that fed life on Earth.

  It was another sun.

  And it would prove for the first time in human history that there were galaxies other than our own, that the universe was much bigger than humans had ever imagined, that there were, in fact, other suns.

  THE AWAKENING

  You sleep over a volcano,

  which may erupt at any moment.

  — LAURA ARNOLD, DESCRIBING THE SOUTH IN A DEBATE ON THE MERITS OF MIGRATION, TWO WEEKS BEFORE SHE HERSELF LEFT NORTH CAROLINA FOR WASHINGTON, D.C.

  I am in the darkness

  of the south

  and I am trying

  my best to get out.

  O please help me

  to get out of

  this low down county

  I am counted no more thin a dog

  help me please help me.

  — AN UNIDENTIFIED LETTER WRITER FROM BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

  CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI,

  LATE SEPTEMBER–EARLY OCTOBER 1937

  ADDIE B., who lived down the road on the same plantation as Ida Mae, rose early to feed the turkeys at her cabin across the field. Addie B. always fretted about her turkeys. She looked all over and called out to them. But there was no clucking or nipping or kicking of dust. The yard was barren. The turkeys were gone. Mr. Edd, the boss man over all of them, would be coming for his turkeys soon, to sell in time for Thanksgiving. There would be no explaining the disappearance to Mr. Edd. The economics were simple. The turkeys were money when money was the one thing nobody had. The punishment—she did not want to think about the punishment. Besides, she had an idea of what happened to her inventory. She decided to tell Mr. Edd her suspicions before he could ask. Mr. Edd rounded up some men.

  Later that night, around nine or ten o’clock, the pounding started on Ida Mae’s door. It was like the sound of wild dogs trailing raw meat. It seemed far away at first, and then it drew closer, mad fists beating the bare face of the cabin. The cabin was dark, and Ida Mae was asleep. She was alone in the house with little Velma and James and her sister-in-law Indiana, who was meek and of little help. Her husband was not yet back from his errands in town. She threw back the coverlet and fingered the sides of the walls to get to the front door. She stumbled past the two little ones, who were, by some miracle, still asleep, stepped around the hearth and between the two beds on each side of the door. Indiana, in the bed closest to the ruckus, got up to follow her and stood behind her and watched.

  Ida Mae cracked open the door and saw the men, four or five of them with chains and shotguns. She recognized the boss man, Mr. Edd. And she recognized his friend Mr. Willie Jim, another planter, but could not make out the faces of the others standing before her in the middle of the night.

  She tried to dispense with them, told them her husband wasn’t in and she didn’t know when he would be back. That wasn’t why they were there. Willie Jim stepped forward to speak for them all. They wanted to know if Joe Lee was in her house.

  Joe Lee was her husband’s cousin, who lived further down the road and would have had no business there that time of night, which is what she told them. He worked the land like the rest of them and, though well into his twenties, still lived on his father’s farm. He had a reputation for taking things that weren’t his. She said she hadn’t seen him.

  “Joe Lee is in there. And we want him outta there.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “That’s alright, we want him outta there.”

  They had searched the other sharecropper cabins. Somebody said they saw Joe Lee escape to her house. Willie Jim was getting agitated, thought she was ornery, disputing them like she was, and raised up his chain and drew it back to hurl at her. Mr. Edd stepped forward and told him not to. He liked George and Ida Mae, and he needed that cotton out of the field.

  “Don’t you hit her,” Mr. Edd said.

  “That’s alright. Let ’em hit me,” Ida said, stiffening herself.

  “No, he ain’t gon’ hit you now,” he told her.

  Willie Jim stepped back, reminded of what they had come for. The men fanned out, their heavy boots clomping the old wood boards on the porch. They surrounded the house and ran toward the back door of the kitchen, the cabin’s only other way out, and caught Joe Lee trying to get away. He had fled into the house as Ida Mae slept. He had darted past Indiana as she lay in bed in the front room. But Indiana was too afraid to tell anybody.

  “Why ain’t you tell me you saw Joe Lee come through here?” Ida Mae asked her afterward. Then she thought about it and realized that if they had caught her in a lie, it would have been worse. And so the two of them concluded it was best that Indiana knew but didn’t tell and that Ida Mae didn’t know and didn’t lie.

  Ida Mae couldn’t go back to sleep, and she couldn’t wait for her husband to get back home. Finally, she heard a motor rumbling outside. She ran out to get him.

  “Get out. I got something to tell you.”

  “What is it?”

  “They come and got Joe Lee out the house.”

  “Who?”

  “Your boss.”

  “I know Mr. Edd ain’t did that.”

  “They caught him trying to step out the back door.”

  They stood absorbing what it meant and not knowing why it happened.

  “What way they went with him?” George asked.

  A part of him wanted to go and set things straight, try to talk some sense into his boss man. Ida Mae didn’t want him to go. No good could come of it. She didn’t see which way they went anyway, black as it was. And they had been gone a good while.

  EUSTIS, FLORIDA, DECEMBER 1941

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE EARTH, at a harbor in Hawaii, a bomb exploded. It was at a naval base. Pearl Harbor. People heard it on the radio, not knowing what it meant.

  The United States was joining the war over in Europe. George Starling got notice to report for an army physical. But the doctor looked him over and disqualified him on account of what the doctor said was a weak heart. George was scared he would die at any minute. But the minutes turned into weeks and then months, and he figured either the doctor didn’t know what he was talking about or his heart had recovered.

  In the spring, there would be no work after the fruit was picked from the trees. George was hearing talk of war jobs up in a place called Detroit. The factories that made cars were rolling out planes and weapons twenty-four hours a day. He did not particularly want to go to Detroit. He didn’t have people there, nor did he know much about it. But they were paying a ridiculous sum of money—dollars an hour instead of pennies a box. He could make enough in a couple of months to last him a year. He heard they were so desperate you could get a job right off the bus. He floated the idea to his wife.

  Inez didn’t want him to go. For most of their marriage, they had been living with Big George at his house on Bates Avenue. She spent her days sweeping up after the white family she had inherited from her mother and aunt and from her grandmother before them. She was scrubbing toilets when what she really wanted to do, she told George, was to go to beauty school in Tampa, the Angelo Beauty College, it was called, and learn how to fix hair.

  She h
ardly ever saw George as it was. When he wasn’t out picking fruit, he was out in the backwoods selling insurance. Lately, he had taken to ferrying people around in his old car as if he were a cab driver. There were no taxis for colored people, so he took people to town for groceries or picked them up after the show to make a little extra money. Friday nights, all day Saturday, and into Sunday evening, George was gone, carrying other people to the things he and Inez could be doing together.

  He called himself saving for the future. He had it all planned out. He would save enough money to put her through beauty school. Then she would start working and help him finish college in Tallahassee. That would be their freedom.

  So he gave his weekends to his passengers. Sometimes they just showed up at his house for him to take them somewhere. Inez was stirring the grits for breakfast when Lil George came into the kitchen one morning.

  “Well, I’m a run this guy downtown to do his shopping,” George said. “I’ll be back by the time you get breakfast ready.”

  He took the man downtown and dropped him off with his groceries. On his way home, somebody else flagged him down.

  “Hey, Lil George, whatchu doin’?”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “How ’bout running me downtown?”

  He would start his morning with the best of intentions and not get back until dark. “But all the while I’m away from home, I’m working,” George said.

  He knew he would be in for a fight as soon as he stepped in the door. “My wife would be swole up big as this room by then ’cause I’m gone all day.”

  George figured as much and tried to soften her up.

  “I know you thought I wasn’t never coming back,” he said.

  She grunted, fuming still.

  He told her what had happened and how people had flagged him down in the street and had no way to get their groceries and how one thing had led to another and you know there was no way to reach you because there weren’t any phones to call from and, anyway, look at what I got.

  Fifty cents on this trip, a dollar on that one, and at the end of the day, George pulled in five, ten, twenty, sometimes thirty dollars in change.

  “See how much money I made while I was out. I made all of this.”

  He dumped it all on the bed, quarters, halves, and paper money. Inez was too mad to look at it.

  “Well, all of this goes toward your going to school. That’s what I’m scuffling for. So you can go to school.”

  She kept quiet. So he went on.

  “I’m a let you save it now,” he said. “ ’Cause you know I was sincere. You put it in the trunk so you know where it is. So when you get enough to go you can go.”

  But she wouldn’t get over all those lost weekends so easily. If he took her wants for granted, she would do the same for his. She stood there as if she hadn’t heard him. So George went and put the money away himself. Soon he had Mason jars full of quarters and halves, fruit jars filled with nickels and change rattling in tin cans, the start of a future in bottles all over the house.

  It was the start of 1943. When the picking season was over and it was nearing spring, everybody’s money went dry. The people needing rides trailed off. George saw it coming and started talking again about going to Detroit for the summer to make enough for them to go to school. He made a note to himself: 1943 was the year for Inez to go to beauty school.

  “When it gets a little bit warmer, when the fruit season is over,” he told her, “I’m going to Detroit to work. Then I could send you to school. It’s nothing to do around here during the summer. Ain’t no working. I can’t even make no money hustling. So I’m going out to Detroit and work and send you to school.”

  George had it all worked out. Inez just listened. The neighbors had been telling her to watch after her husband. He wasn’t going to Detroit to work, they said, he was going to be with some woman, probably one of those schoolteachers he went to school with up in Tallahassee. Heard one of them was up in D.C. Bet he’s going up there to be with her. He’s not going to Detroit.

  Inez was quiet. So he repeated himself.

  “This year, you going to Tampa. I want you to go to school.”

  “I don’t want to go to no school. I changed my mind. I want to go to Detroit with you.”

  “What you talking ’bout? You been preaching about Angelo Beauty School, now you want to go to Detroit? You go on to beauty school, where you wanted to go. You can always see the world. You can’t always go to school. You’re not going to Detroit with me. That’s it.”

  The neighbors would surely talk now. Some came up to George himself. “Why you not letting your wife go with you? They say you not going to Detroit. You going to D.C.”

  He paid them no mind and caught a bus up to Detroit with his friends Sam Gaskin and Charlie Bollar, whom they called Mud.

  The day he left, Inez was too mad and too hurt to say good-bye.

  She headed to work. “I hope you all take care of yourselves” was all she could manage.

  They made B-29 cargo planes at a plant in Hamtramck. George arrived in the late spring of 1943, and they put him to work on a jig making frame covers for the hatch doors and rudders of the cargo planes. They applied chemicals to the covers to make them strong but light. The chemicals were so flammable that anyone caught with a cigarette in his pocket was fired on the spot.

  George set about learning the job and adjusting to a gray concrete city he wasn’t particular about when a cousin of his wife’s showed up unannounced. That was the point. Inez had sent him to see if George was really there and not with some other woman. The cousin reported back that George was doing what he said he was, and only then could Inez feel halfway good about going on to Tampa to take a short course in beauty culture.

  George worked nights drilling holes around hatch door frames to attach the covers with screws. He had to bend or lie flat or get on his knees and twist himself to drill the holes straight.

  The place was swimming with Communist sympathizers and alleged saboteurs, or so people said, in the hothouse of wartime. Because spies were believed to be inside the plants themselves, any missing or wrongly placed screws were enough to draw suspicion and reprisals in an already cheerless endeavor.

  “This made it a nervous, nerve-racking situation,” George would say years later. “You know, you drilling all kind of ways and you trying at your very best, and every now and then, you gonna get a hole angle, it’s not gonna be right. But if you got too many of them, then you were in trouble.”

  And every minute, George was scared the whole place would blow up from all the chemicals and paranoia.

  Then on the humid night of Sunday, June 20, 1943, a fight broke out between several hundred white and colored men on Belle Isle, a park extending into the Detroit River on the east side of town. The fighting spread north, south, and west as rumors circulated among blacks that white men had killed a colored woman and thrown her baby into the Detroit River and, among whites, that colored men had raped and killed a white woman in the park.

  Neither rumor turned out to be true, but it was all that was needed to set off one of the worst riots ever seen in the United States, an outbreak that would mark a turning point in American race relations. Until the 1943 uprising in Detroit, most riots in the United States, from the 1863 Draft Riots in New York to the riots in Tulsa in 1921, to Atlanta in 1906 to Washington, D.C., to Chicago, Springfield, and East St. Louis, Illinois, and Wilmington, North Carolina, among others, had been white attacks on colored people, often resulting in the burning of entire colored sections or towns.

  This was the first major riot in which blacks fought back as earnestly as the whites and in which black residents, having become established in the city but still relegated to run-down ghettos, began attacking and looting perceived symbols of exploitation, the stores and laundries run by whites and other outsiders that blacks felt were cheating them. It was only after Detroit that riots became known as primarily urban phenomena, ultimately center
ed on inner-city blacks venting their frustrations on the ghettos that confined them.

  The Detroit riots went on for close to a week, ending in thirty-four deaths and more than one thousand wounded. The Sunday night the riots began, as many as five thousand people joined in the stoning, stabbing, beating, and shooting, so many people injured that the municipal hospital was admitting riot victims at a rate of one a minute.

  George was living at 208 Josephine near Hastings and Woodward and heard the mayhem in the streets and on the radio all through the night. He was living in the middle of the crowded colored quarter mockingly called Paradise Valley, where blacks were stoning the cars of passing whites, whites were beating up blacks as they emerged from the all-night theaters on Woodward, and an inspector on the scene reported to the police commissioner that the situation was out of control.

  The rioting continued into the next morning. It was now Monday, the start of the work week. A co-worker of George’s called him up.

  “Hey, Starling, what you gonna do?”

  “Do ’bout what?”

  “ ’Bout going to work.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Man, you must be crazy.”

  “What you talking about?”

  “Don’t you know? Where you been? You didn’t know it was a riot going on?”

  “Yeah, but I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. I ain’t in no gang.”

  “This ain’t no gang fight. This is a riot.”

  “Well, they ain’t gonna bother me. I ain’t done nothing to nobody. I’m going on to work.”

  “You gonna get yourself killed.”

  George had to take two trolleys to get to Hamtramck. He boarded the first in a colored neighborhood and instantly knew something was wrong. The colored people were sitting up straight; the white people were crouched in their seats so they couldn’t be seen out the window.